SOURCE: “Never Mind the Width, Feel the Lack of Quality,” in The Spectator, May 13, 1995, pp. 44-5.

In the following review, Bywater offers a negative assessment of pop music and The Faber Book of Pop.

Those who can’t, no longer teach, but go into journalism, where the great thing is to natter and scratch like hens. Scratch, scratch, scratch. That’s why journalists love the pop industry: plenty of surface. Scratch it away and, look!, more surface, and it changes every day. Pop is surface all the way down. The musical toolbag contains only surface instruments—rhythmic thud, punch, whine and whop—and the emotions, too, are superficial: easily dissembled, easily aroused. Sometimes pop musicians kill themselves to notify their fans that their emotions are genuine. It is the apotheosis of superficiality.

The surface detail is fascinating. It’s hypnotic. You can go on writing it down for...